Re: XL compiler name in Cell

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hello Roger,

thanks for the report and patch.

* Roger Ferrer Ibáñez wrote on Mon, Dec 01, 2008 at 02:38:08PM CET:
>
> although XL is currently supported by the latest release of libtool,  
> IBM's Cell toolchain preprends the name of the compiler with 'ppu'  
> (standing for PPU, Power Processing Unit of the CBE Architecture).  
> Compilers are thus called 'ppuxlc', 'ppuxlC' and 'ppuxlf' (the latest  
> one for Fortran). Out of the box libtool does not recognize these  
> compilers as XL and does not pass the proper flags to generate dynamic  
> libraries.

Yep.

> Attached there is a minor patch to support 'ppuxl[cC]' and 'ppuxlf',  
> besides plain 'xl[cC]' and 'xlf'. We initially considered something like  
> '*xl[cC]' and '*xlf' but we think it is a bit crude (and 'spuxlc', which  
> does not support dynamic libraries would be incorrectly guessed as doing  
> so).

OK.  There is one other instance you missed out (on purpose?), in
_LT_LANG_CXX_CONFIG, near line 5891.  Could you please fix that,
then look at tests/fcdemo-{conf,shared,static}.test to decide whether
these need a change, too?  And then please run the Libtool test suite
  make -k check

(add VERBOSE=yes for verbose output), and post information about all
failures you encounter?  You should have configured the libtool sources
to use the ppu compilers for all languages that you have available;
e.g., if you have C, C++, and Fortran compilers, then use something like
  ./configure -C CC=ppuxlc CXX=ppuxlC F77=ppuxlf FC=ppuxlf95 GCJ=no

Thank you.

> On the other hand, I wonder whether there is a way to tell libtool that  
> the found compiler can be handled like another known to libtool, without  
> having to resort on strategically named soft links or shell scripts.

ATM there is no better way.  It might be valuable to add one, though.
Not sure which kind of interface would be good.  Something like
  ./configure CC=foo LT_CC_API=gcc

?  config.rpath may need adjusting then, too, dunno about other
third-party infrastructure.

Cheers,
Ralf